The present invention relates to deploying virtual machines onto blade servers, and more specifically, using workload characteristics to determine whether to stitch blade servers together.
A typical blade server chassis can hold 7 full wide blades, which each occupy two slots, or 14 half wide blades, which each occupy one slot. The blade servers typically include independent operating servers and separate processors, memory, storage, hypervisors, etc. The blade server chassis includes a backplane that is used to permit the blades to communicate with each other and the outside world.
In some instances, two or more of the blade servers operate as a single blade server. More specifically, when the blade servers are ordered from a vendor, the purchaser specifies whether the blades should be independent servers or combined. Once this mode of operation is selected, the blade servers remain in the specified mode—i.e., the blade servers do not change their mode.